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How to fix your AMD Graphics in Ubuntu 12.10 (updated)

The last week or so has been one of transition for AMD’s Catalyst driver, especially for those you have a quite old Radeon GPU. Alongside the launch of Ubuntu 12.10 – that comes with new xorg 1.13 and breaks the fglrx (aka Catalyst 12.9) – AMD has also drop the support for Radeon HD 4000, HD 3000 or HD 2000 graphics cards, forcing a broken upgrade up to Quantal 12.10. On the development side of things, this problem is not 100% percent related to Ubuntu 12.10, but it comes with the new version of xorg 1.13 that is included in Quantal, meaning that you need to downgrade xorg down to 1.12. So for the time being there is no AMD Legacy support with X-Server 1.13, and you need to downgrade. Capping this off, the solution comes from inside the root of the problem, thus AMD’s driver team has launched a new driver for these outdated GPU models, called Catalyst Legacy.

It’s clear these jumps in complexity and development time doesn't work for linux, breaking everything upside down. This makes us quite disappointed because many users when they wished to upgrade their Ubuntu 12.04 up to 12.10, they encountered a problem concerning their graphics. Maybe that's why there are some negative comments, concerning Unity's speed.

“AMD has moved to the AMD Radeon™ HD 4000, AMD Radeon HD 3000, and AMD Radeon HD 2000 Series new driver support model. These updates will focus on resolving application specific issues and critical updates. The reason for the shift in support policy is largely due to the fact that the AMD Radeon HD 4000, AMD Radeon HD 3000, and AMD Radeon HD 2000 Series have been optimized to their maximum potential from a performance and feature perspective.“

As we stated earlier, AMD will be moving to a dynamic/as-needed schedule for driver releases. It’s their hope – as it is ours – that they’ll be able to further improve on the quality and meaningfulness of Catalyst driver releases. Certainly this decision is a good thing for new hardware support since you upgrade your hardware in regular basis. However, sad but true, I personally own a Radeon HD4890 and now it's nothing more than a Legacy garbage down the mouldy basement.

[dropcap]let's fix the problem[/dropcap]

Downgrade from X-Server 1.13 to X-Server 1.12

Download the Legacy Driver

install it

"patch it" (since you would not be able to install vanilla drivers on 3.5 kernel.)

[highlight color="yellow"]OR Tomasz Makarewicz will do all the above steps automatically[/highlight]

OR IF YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TO DOWNGRADE X-SERVER, PATCH THE VANILLA KERNEL ETC... TRY THIS PPA

We've been informed by OSArena that with the release of the Catalyst 12.6 Legacy, there is a 3rd party repo created byTomasz Makarewicz for this purpose only. You can't install AMD Legacy on Ubuntu 12.10. It is not supporting X-Server 1.13. X-Server 1.12 will not break Unity. Actually in Tomasz ppa he is downgrading X-Server to 1.12 version to make it work with fglrx-legacy. Just in case you want to follow the white rabbit, here's the path for the blue pill...

Hi,This tutorial is misleading. Not only you must downgrade X-Server to version 1.12, but also put special patch on driver to make it work with kernel 3.5. Of coures my ppa (which is given here) is doing all of that. So feel safe to use it.Best regards

Trying to install drivers AMD Radeon 6470m on a fresh install of Ubuntu 12.10. Followed instructions, and everything installs ok but upon reboot no menu bar, nothing appears, just the background?? (no unity).

Thanks Tomasz for the PPA and Panos for posting the details. I had upgraded my Dell Inspiron 2305 to Ubuntu 12.04 (not enough research on my part) and my graphics were screwed. The PPA fixed that and I'm up and running again.

I have used your ppa to install the fglrx driver, and it seems to have worked, but now my graphics are visibly slower then before. I'm using a ATI Radeon HD 3200 and the system reports "VESA: RS780M" as my graphics. I'm new to Ubuntu.

HI, i had a same problem with my graphic card ( ati radeon HD7650m). when i install ubuntu v 11.10/12.04/12.10, in software information see`s her as unknown device. i tried update, all the steps a find on forums, tried to change the codes in driver of graphic but nothing...so. i install kubuntu and he find her immediately. i hope that help :)

I have the same problem with the same card HD 4350, I've done just like the tuto and have only a background. Obviusly all works through a terminal but please give us a feed-back with a posible solucion or error that we could be done.Regards!!!! :(

Today Ubuntu upgraded X server in 12.04 as well it seems, which breaks compatibility with fglrx as well. I thought LTS releases should be stable.. Anyway, ppa did not work for me, but downloading and installing AMD driver did the trick, thank you (except the annoying watermark).I have no idea what they did but it simply broke the Xserver.

I wanted to take a moment and thank you both, one for offing this wonderful site and two taking the time to post this toutorial. I really appriciate you both for offering us a solution that truely works.

For Unity in 13.04 it needs some tweaking else it shows some strange artifacts every now and then; for example in shotwell and gimp - nothing important but you surely dont like - To workaround this use compizconfig-settings-manager to tweak unity : basically disable the "animations" and "fading" ; and in the "workarounds" section of ccsm you should enable the fglrx XGL fix . It might also be good if you dont want to manipulate manually to just simply switch to Unitys low graphics mode, this disables a lot eyecandy automatically - google for UNITY_LOW_GFX how to force this.

Once all is working you must prepare ubuntu to keep your setup forever, because you have created a Frankenstein OS using this ppa, mixed Xorg from 12.04 with Unity of one year later .. this is unsupported of course therefore you must trick ubuntu updater to allow this mix :

So make sure that you lock all fglrx and xserver/x11/xorg packages afterwards to the versions from the ppa so that they will not be accidently upgraded via ubuntus update mechanism. To do so use synaptic package managers advanced settings, choose the packages one by one and choose from synaptics menu to lock/pin this exact version.

This way you can run updater, keep the rest of the OS up to date, excluding the graphic stack and fglrx driver.

Hi, I'm having the same problem but when I follow the makarewicz ppa method then reboot I get to the Ubuntu purple screen then it goes black and that's it.The only way to get it back is purge fglrx but then I have no launcher and menu.I have a HP n40 microserver with on board HD4200 no room or power supply to run much else. HELP PLEASE.

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